“What specific magazines did Ellochka the Cannibal read? Why could Ostap so quickly marry the widow of Gritsatsuyev? What was the strange status of «friend of children» written in the documents of Konrad Karlovich Michelson? What were the movies and the fashion during «the frenzy of the NEP»?”

At the time when I’m writing this, the lecture of Galina Ivankina begins in the Chitalcafé bookstore in Moscow: Everyday life of Muscovites in Ilf and Petrov’s novels. What would I have given to listen to such talk at the time of collecting material to the post on kommunalki! And this is not the only one! In the Chitalcafé they have lectures three times a week on topics such as “Soviet retail trade”, “Stalin’s tall buildings”, “Moscow’s pubs”, “Mandelstam’s Moscow”, “Legends of Moscow from Noah to Stalin”, “The age of congestion: Taganka, disco, French salad”, by the best experts and most passionate researchers of the everyday life of old Moscow, such as Alexei Dedushkin or Leonid Vidgof. My heart is broken. Each lecture is a lost post of Río Wang, which I cannot read.

Well, I wanted to use a verb with a possibly wide semantic field to includes both recording and/or taking notes, but it seems to have failed. Well, now I have downgraded it just to recording (which is the easier and most exact option anyway).

But no option substitutes for the magic of being personally there and listen to the lectures…